"New Musical Resources" - Important Draft Manuscript, including 19 pages of autograph musical examples.

Working manuscript for Henry Cowell's New Musical Resources, begun in 1916 while Cowell was studying with Charles Seeger at Berkeley and published in 1930. 60 page spirit-duplicated copy on legal paper (8.5 x 13"; some pages are 8.5x11 pasted with extensions to be legal size), some with typed or autograph corrections in ink and including 19 pages of autograph music written in ink in the hand of the composer, consisting of 15 tables and 42 musical examples (13 of which are multi-part) overall. Musical examples are pasted to sheets with captions. Scattered light foxing, folded corners and minor tears at edges, the typed sections quite faded at points but visible and generally very good.

New Musical Resources was widely considered to be one of the most important works of music theory in the first half of the twentieth century, and certainly the most significant theoretical effort by any American modernist. John Cage described it as the "open sesame" of American music, and Cowell's theories about tone clusters were so influential as to lead Béla Bartók to write to Cowell asking permission to use them in his own music. Among its most important innovations was the use of the overtone series to coordinate many aspects of composition, including pitch and rhythm. In the minds of Cowell and his fellow modernists - especially Carl Ruggles and Dane Rudhyar - this gave a "natural" basis to the increased use of dissonance in their respective compositional languages, one of the most characteristic qualities of American "ultra-modernism" which flourished from roughly 1915 to 1940.

In the 1969 edition of New Musical Resources, Jocelyn Godwin reports that Cowell committed to publishing the work only in 1928, having the work "typed out, reproduced in mauve ink on a spirit duplicator, and sent the rounds of likely publishers." (Godwin, ed, New Musical Resources (1969), x; see discussion in David Nicholls's 1996 edition). The New York Public Library holds two of these duplicates, similar but varying in important ways from the present exemplar. Nicholls's 1996 description of the sources was based only on a partial view of the NYPL's Cowell Holdings, but it is the most complete publicly available account of the known sources for New Musical Resources. Nicholls notes that the two NYPL spirit duplicates could have been written at any point between 1919 and 1928, but assigns them to the earlier part of that window for stylistic reasons. Nicholls's general description of the main 1919 spirit duplicate of the original typescript matches the present version, with 41 typed pages though with an unspecified number of musical examples in manuscript. However, his analysis of the differences between the NYPL copy and the 1930 published version suggest that our exemplar in fact predates the one held at the NYPL used by Nicholls as his primary point of reference. Of chief interest, the present copy has original typing in darker ink on top of the spirit duplicated pages on nine pages.

In particular, the overtyped examples in our exemplar provide evidence of the ongoing refinement of Cowell's terminology. The majority of the alterations made here involve the addition of the word "partial," replacing a different word ("overtone"?) which has been erased in each instance. This important change in terminology is not cited as a difference by Nicholls in his source comparison between the NYPL typescript and the 1930 version. Further clarifications in Cowell's section on tempo are also not noted by Nicholls, raising the possibility that the version he consulted was in fact a duplicate run from this particular version after Cowell had modified it.

The manuscript music in this typescript include detailed examples of Cowell's idiosyncratic notational style for New Musical Resources. Of particular note are the various notational possibilities that Cowell developed for notating tone clusters, as well as the noteheads of different shapes (diamonds, triangles, and squares) that Cowell used to illustrate further shading of notational detail. (9626)

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Manuscript Music

Classical Music

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